Running db2.ipynb gives jsondecodeerror

I am a complete novice in this area and trying to understand
I have a linux machine with anaconda, python, ibm_db, jupyter notebooks installed
I am following a pdf to activate a db2 connection from notebook
started jupyter : ok
open new notebook and : %run db2.ipynb
this notebook I downloaded from
https://github.com/DB2-Samples/db2jupyter
Only one file is needed: db2.ipynb
when running this notebook I get an error

JSONDecodeError Traceback (most recent call last)
/Software/Anaconda/lib/python3.7/site-packages/nbformat/reader.py in parse_json(s, **kwargs)
13 try:
—> 14 nb_dict = json.loads(s, **kwargs)
15 except ValueError:

/Software/Anaconda/lib/python3.7/json/init.py in loads(s, encoding, cls, object_hook, parse_float, parse_int, parse_constant, object_pairs_hook, **kw)
347 parse_constant is None and object_pairs_hook is None and not kw):
–> 348 return _default_decoder.decode(s)
349 if cls is None:

/Software/Anaconda/lib/python3.7/json/decoder.py in decode(self, s, _w)
336 “”"
–> 337 obj, end = self.raw_decode(s, idx=_w(s, 0).end())
338 end = _w(s, end).end()

/Software/Anaconda/lib/python3.7/json/decoder.py in raw_decode(self, s, idx)
354 except StopIteration as err:
–> 355 raise JSONDecodeError(“Expecting value”, s, err.value) from None
356 return obj, end

JSONDecodeError: Expecting value: line 7 column 1 (char 6)

During handling of the above exception, another exception occurred:

NotJSONError Traceback (most recent call last)
As this notebook has been supplied by ibm, there must be something missing

do you have an idea/link where I could find additional info
thanks for all update
best regards, Guy Przytula